'Forefathers' in the Bible

He replied to them, “Why also do you violate the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition [handed down by the elders]?

he is not to honor his father or his mother [by helping them with their need].’ So by this you have invalidated the word of God [depriving it of force and authority and making it of no effect] for the sake of your tradition [handed down by the elders].

and you say, ‘If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have joined them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’

Fill up the measure of your forefathers' guilt.

(For the Pharisees and all of the Jews do not eat unless they carefully wash their hands, holding firmly to the traditions of the elders;

So the Pharisees and scribes asked Jesus, “Why do Your disciples not live their lives according to the tradition of the elders, but [instead] eat their bread with [ceremonially] unwashed hands?”

Just as He promised to our fathers,To Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

To show mercy [as He promised] to our fathers,And to remember His holy covenant [the promised blessing],

Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for your reward in heaven is great [absolutely inexhaustible]; for their fathers used to treat the prophets in the same way.

Woe to you when all the people speak well of you and praise you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.

Alas for you! for you repair the tombs of the Prophets, whom your forefathers killed.

It follows that you bear testimony to the actions of your forefathers and that you fully approve thereof. They slew, you build.

Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place where one ought to worship is in Jerusalem [at the temple].”

Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written [in Scripture], ‘He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’”

Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.

This is the Bread which came down out of heaven. It is not like [the manna that] our fathers ate and they [eventually] died; the one who eats this Bread [believes in Me, accepts Me as Savior] will live forever.”

However, because Moses gave you the practice of circumcision (not that it came from Moses, but from the forefathers), you circumcise a male child on the Sabbath.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our forefathers, has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate after he had decided to release him.

Moses said, ‘The Lord God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your countrymen; you shall listen to Him and obey everything He tells you.

You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your ancestors, saying to Abraham, And all the families of the earth will be blessed through your offspring.

The God of our forefathers raised up Jesus, whom you seized and killed by hanging him on a tree.

Then a famine and great suffering came over all of Egypt and Canaan, and our ancestors could find no food.

When Jacob heard there was grain in Egypt, he sent our ancestors the first time.

and Jacob went down to Egypt. He and our ancestors died there,

He dealt deceitfully with our race and oppressed our ancestors by making them leave their infants outside, so they wouldn’t survive.

I am the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. So Moses began to tremble and did not dare to look.

He is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness together with the angel who spoke to him on Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors. He received living oracles to give to us.

Our ancestors were unwilling to obey him, but pushed him away, and in their hearts turned back to Egypt.

“Our ancestors had the tabernacle of the testimony in the wilderness, just as He who spoke to Moses commanded him to make it according to the pattern he had seen.

Our ancestors in turn received it and with Joshua brought it in when they dispossessed the nations that God drove out before our fathers, until the days of David.

“You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are always resisting the Holy Spirit; as your ancestors did, so do you.

Which one of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? They killed those who proclaimed beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become;

The God of this people Israel chose our ancestors, exalted the people during their stay in the land of Egypt, and led them out of it with a mighty arm.

And we ourselves proclaim to you the good news of the promise that was made to our ancestors.

For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep and was buried among his fathers and experienced decay [in the grave];

Now then, why are you testing God by putting a yoke on the disciples’ necks that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear?

"I am a Jew, born at Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city. I was carefully trained at the feet of Gamaliel in the Law of our forefathers, and, like all of you to-day, was zealous for God.

And he said, ‘The God of our fathers has appointed you to know His will, [and to progressively understand His plan with clarity and power] and to see the Righteous One [Jesus Christ, the Messiah] and to hear a message from His [own] mouth.

But this I confess to you--that in the way which they style a heresy, I worship the God of our forefathers, believing everything that is taught in the Law or is written in the Prophets,

And now I am standing trial for the hope of the promise made by God to our fathers.

After three days he called together the leaders of the Jews. When they had gathered he said to them: “Brothers, although I have done nothing against our people or the customs of our ancestors, I was delivered as a prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans.

Disagreeing among themselves, they began to leave after Paul made one statement: “The Holy Spirit correctly spoke through the prophet Isaiah to your ancestors

The ancestors are theirs, and from them, by physical descent, came the Messiah, who is God over all, praised forever. Amen.

Regarding the gospel, they are enemies for your advantage, but regarding election, they are loved because of the patriarchs,

My meaning is that Christ has become a servant to the people of Israel in vindication of God's truthfulness-- in showing how sure are the promises made to our forefathers--

For I do not want you to be unaware, believers, that our fathers were all under the cloud [in which God’s presence went before them] and they all passed [miraculously and safely] through the [Red] Sea;

and was progressing in Judaism beyond many contemporaries in my nation, [because] I was a far more zealous adherent of the traditions handed down by my forefathers.

I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers with pure conscience, that without ceasing I have remembrance of thee in my prayers night and day;

God, having spoken in former times in fragmentary and varied fashion to our forefathers by the prophets,

do not harden your hearts as your forefathers did in the time of the provocation on the day of the temptation in the Desert,

where your forefathers so sorely tried My patience and saw all that I did during forty years.

seeing that the warning still comes to us, "To-day, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as your forefathers did in the time of the provocation."

Not like the covenant that I made with their fathersOn the day when I took them by the handTo lead them out of the land of Egypt;For they did not abide in My covenant,And so I withdrew My favor and disregarded them, says the Lord.

knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers,

and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming [what has become of it]? For ever since the fathers fell asleep [in death], all things have continued [exactly] as they did from the beginning of creation.”